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Archaeology & Cyclical Perception

The Cycles of Time offer insight into the array of often bewildering theories of ancient and lost civilizations. How is it possible for so many researchers to come up with such diverse conclusions? Why has the ‘modern’ mind been so closed to the idea that previous civilizations were more advanced than ours? Rene Guenon, the brilliant French metaphysical author, sheds light on our capacity to understand the past in his book ‘The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times’ (1945).

In 'The Limits of History and Geography' (chapter 19), Guenon states that there are ‘qualitative’ differences in the four cycles of time. These qualitative differences are expressions of a vast spectrum of ever altering frequencies, reflecting varying states of consciousness. Even within each cycle there are cycles within cycles that produce qualitative variations, both in manifested 'appearances' and perception.

According to the theory of the Cycles of Time found in the ancient Sanskrit texts, we begin in the higher states of consciousness and devolve. Contrary to current scientific opinion, we are not evolving — rather we are experiencing the ongoing processes of increasing limitation in perception, as we descend through the stages of ‘The Solidification of Matter’.

Beginning in 3606 BC, we have been living in the last and most dense cycle, the Kali Yuga, the Age of Confusion and Conflict. Therefore our perceptions are atrophied and more limited than ever before. In the previous cycles we are not trapped in and limited to five-sense differentiated perception. In previous yugas remote viewing, telepathy and other so-called paranormal abilities were ‘normal’ and are called the Siddhis in Sanskrit.

Perhaps our most absurd limitation is to imagine that the ancients possessed a similar mentality to our own. We judge the past and the people of antiquity through our ‘modern’ western scientific filtered conditioning. We assume that our mentality is superior, advanced, and from this false premise we judge and dismiss what in fact we are incapable of understanding. Because we exist within a cycle of density and confusion, a period advanced into the solidification of matter, we confer on all our perceptions corresponding appearances “according to quantitative, mechanistic, or materialistic conceptions.” Guenon points out that while this is what makes the practical applications of modern science succeed, however such narrow vision also results in wrong conclusions and blinding delusion.

The World is Consciousness

In the previous cycles of time, the ancient world was not as ‘solid’ as it has become today and our conditioned perception of the separation of what is corporeal and what is ‘subtle’ (beneath the curtain of each atom) had not yet become so completely atrophied. “It was not only that man, whose faculties were then much less narrowly limited, did not see the world with eyes that were the same as those of today, and perceived things which since then have escaped him entirely; but also, and correlatively, the world itself, as a cosmic entity, was indeed qualitatively different…”

Guenon states that even the archaeological remains of ancient civilizations have been affected by ‘the solidification of matter’ as we have descended down through the Cycles of Time. If as he says, these ‘vestiges’ had not participated in ongoing ‘solidification’ they would have simply and completely disappeared. In fact many ancient structures did disappear, but only to our modern defective eyes. This understanding is beyond the capacity of most archaeologist and researchers, who don’t have an understanding of traditional metaphysics and therefore do not have the consciousness necessary to perceive through the Veils of Time — and as one master has said, “the ears to hear”!

According to Guenon as we reach back into the ancient world, barriers arise. Attempts to establish chronology before the 6 th century BC diverge into a plethora of estimations, “so much so that divergences in the estimation of the dates of objects and events amount to centuries and sometimes even to whole millennia…” Contradicting theories abound and recently even carbon dating has become suspect.

Miasma & Delusion

The typical reaction of modern scientific thinking is to deny whatever may be quite beyond them, thus the ancients are accused of being primitives, lacking in modern scientific procedure and technology. However it is only our own continually weakening faculties of perception that allow us “to hold the accounts of the ancients in derision.” As our world has moved deeper into ‘solidification’ our “faculties of conception and perception that allowed man to reach out to something other than the coarsest and most inferior mode of reality were totally atrophied…”

Guenon also gives evidence of similar misconceptions in geography and states that there is a ‘sacred’ geography, which is the basis for the establishment of traditional sacred centres.

Guenon concludes that chapter with the understanding that we cannot expect much, if any change in ‘modern’ thinking and scholarship: “…they will naturally adhere to this negative attitude until some changes in the ‘face’ of the world come to destroy once and for all their deceptive security.”

In a recent online article describing the failure and destructive influence of ‘elaborate econometric models’ used by the Federal Reserve to predict human events and behaviour, the author D. Devine quotes F.A. Hayek, a Nobel Laureate. Hayek predicted that people in the future would look back and “discover that the most widely held ideas which dominated the twentieth century (like scientific planning) were all based on superstitions…an over estimation of what science has achieved.”

Hayek was quite prescient and correct, only he did not grasp that larger view — that this process has been ongoing for the last 6000 years, throughout the current Kali Yuga, the Age of Confusion. The planet Neptune has been in Pisces since 2012 and will remain so until 2025. Neptune in Pisces can bring the world into a greater expanded consciousness, or into a tsunami of delusion both religious and scholastic.

Comments

I sort of prefer the "short count" version of the Yuga cycle rather than the "long count". The long count makes each period encompass vast amounts of time, up to millions of years.

The short count, on the other hand, roughly corresponds to the Platonic "Great Year", i.e., the precession of the equinoxes. In the short count, Kali Yuga is about 1200 years in duration. So the ascending phase of the Kali Yuga began in September 499 AD, and since September 1699, we have been in the ascending phase of the Dwapara Yuga.

Since you seem to be certain that the world is still devolving in ever deepening chaos and confusion, I am betting you prefer the long count, hehe.

Great articles on the yugas. Thanks very much for your work in putting them together.

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